Internet Alchemy

• Prophet
  A grounded, semirelational, peer to peer replicated, disconnected, versioned, property database with self-healing conflict resolution. Perl + svn + http
  (tags: opensource distributed database sync perl)

• Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Freebies Bonanza
  Cool giveaway from Tor books - ebooks + cover artwork
  (tags: books fantasy free ebooks)

• Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Death of Google’s Patents
  US Patent Office is changing its rules to disallow patenting of processes unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine”
  (tags: software patents law)
• Park Place
  An Amazon-S3 Clone in Ruby. Clones the API but stores the data on your own machine
  (tags: s3 ruby amazon)

• [Standards] Google Androïd SDK not XMPP compliant ?
  Explanation from Google of why they dropped XMPP support in Android. Cost of session initiation is too high, bandwidth usage is too high (and compression eats more battery power), massive variety of carrier network issues.
  (tags: google jabber xmpp mobile)

• Desktop Flickr Organizer for Gnome
  (tags: flickr linux gnome photography)

I’m writing this from the depths of the Tuscan countryside overlooking mountains and chestnut forests. I’m staying with Danny Ayers at his house in Mozzanella near Castelnuovo di Garfagnana. Danny has often invited me over to stay with him and I’ve finally made it but unfortunately it’s not a trip I can enjoy. Sadly I’m here because Danny’s wife, Caroline, passed away last Saturday. It was a real shock because it happened so quickly. She was diagnosed with Leukemia only about two weeks ago and died from complications arising from her treatment.

I only met Caroline a few times but even in those brief conversations she struck me as an amazingly intelligent and independent woman, with a depth of artistic talent. She was also a real rock for Danny.

Danny is doing ok, but I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. The myriad dogs and cats that share this house are more than enough to keep him busy and the neighbours are incredibly supportive and helpful. In fact it’s pretty obvious that he and Caroline are much loved. I’m here for a few days and a series of family members are turning up over the next few weeks. However, I’m sure Danny would love to hear from his friends online.

• persevere-framework - Google Code
  REST JSON database, distributed computing, and persistent object mapping for JavaScript

  (tags: json persistence rest db javascript)

• ONLamp.com — TCP Tuning and Network Troubleshooting
  Tuning TCP buffer size to make best use of network bandwidth
  (tags: tcp network tuning java)

Just found out that Google docs supports posting to blogs, so I thought I’d try it out

Not sure how to include a title for the post yet though!

Aha, you just have to change the document title by clicking on the text above the toolbar … or so I thought. That doesn’t seem to work

According to this post the title should be picked up from the document title, so not sure what’s going on there.

It seems that Google have quietly rolled out offline access for docs too… and PDF support at long last with full-text searching over them. Cool stuff.

• Linux Support for O2 3G Card (Sierra Wireless AirCard 880)
  (tags: 3g linux network o2 sierra)
• UK GPRS/3G Internet access for Linux, via Vodafone and O2
  Chat scripts for O2 3G access
  (tags: 3g mobile linux o2)